What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem
of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the
least harm; capitalism is that kind of system.

Milton Friedman

The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic
society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.

Christopher Dawson

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of
enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labour and effort,
enterprise and new activity.

William Taft

[Adam] Smith was not the proponent of any one class. He
was a slave to his system. His whole economic philosophy stemmed from his
unquestioning faith in the ability of the market to guide the system to its point of
highest return. The market—that wonderful social machine—would
take care of society’s needs if it was left alone. Don’t try to do good,
says Smith. Let good emerge as the by-product of selfishness.

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1961

It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist
system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it
came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary
failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium
with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what
economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

The book [Keynes’ The General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money] was revolutionary: no other word will
quite do. It stood economics on its head for the book had a startling and dismaying
conclusion. There was no automatic safety mechanism after all! Rather than a
see-saw which would always right itself, the economy resembled an elevator: it could be
going up or down, but it could also be standing perfectly still. And it was just as
capable of standing still on the ground floor as at the top of the shaft. A depression,
in other words, might not cure itself at all; the economy could lie prostrate
indefinitely, like a ship becalmed.

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1961

I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be
made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in
sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable.

John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism has never anywhere provided good houses at
moderate cost. Housing, it seems unnecessary to stress, is an important adjunct of a
successful urban life. Nor does capitalism provide good health services, and when
people live close together with attendant health risks, these too are important. Nor
does capitalism provide efficient transportation for people—another essential
of the life of the Metropolis. In Western Europe and Japan the failure of capitalism
in the fields of housing, health and transportation is largely, though not completely,
accepted. There industries have been intensively socialized. In the United States
there remains the conviction that, however contrary the experience, private
enterprise will eventually serve.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the
middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.

George Orwell, England Your England, 1941

In Europe and the United States the two decades following
the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time
when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries
production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly
stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to
take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

Ownership is not a general feature of our society, determining
its character. On the contrary, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of
others is the general feature of our society.

Hilaire Belloc, The Restoration of Property, 1936

When well-divided property has disappeared and Capitalism
has taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural
economic tendencies.

Hilaire Belloc, The Restoration of Property, 1936

The power of the State must be invoked for restoring
economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic
freedom.

Hilaire Belloc, The Restoration of Property, 1936

Only through big government can democratic authority resist
concentrated economic power.

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but
too few capitalists.

G. K. Chesterton

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal
Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present
Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

G. K. Chesterton

The Liberal Party abandoned the principles of reform and
social liberalism and has become, instead, just another piece of political machinery
in the service of corporatism.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

The corporation is the dominant and dominating institution of
our time. Governments identify growth and development with commercial
corporations and shower them with subsidies, tax privileges, and appropriate labour
legislation and market support to attract a commitment and investment.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the
worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade
and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.

The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision
beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national
governments.

Peter Drucker

Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the
corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process
by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used
and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is
avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

Consider the hypothesis that the world is being steered by
moneyed interests with special access to governments. This would have obvious
implications for democratic reforms. It would mean that it is nearly useless to
resort to reasoned arguments of a kind that the powers-that-be understand very well
but consider not in their interests to recognize.

Economic Reform, June 2001

Half the population hold that the government is run by a few
big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.

Noam Chomsky

Bigness, especially big business, is the curse of democratic
life.

Big corporations went from being tax payers to tax recipients,
and by 1986, the conservative Economist calculates, lost revenues from
industry tax breaks “exceeded the government’s entire receipts from the personal
income tax.”

Wayne Roberts

Capital, never concerned with distribution, is now less and
less concerned with production. Capital is driving for power, for the control over
markets, lands, resources. Capital, in corporate hands, can move anywhere and
thus demand and get the utmost in concessions and privileges as well as the freedom
to operate in the interest of ever-increasing wealth and assets.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

Why would you pour a foundation, buy machines, hire
employees, if you can make as much money buying bonds?

Frank Stronach, Former CEO of Magna International

The payment of the worker is not determined by the value of
his product.

Albert Einstein

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask
him whose.

There’s no evidence that more people with more skills would
produce more jobs. There’s a great deal of evidence that they produce more
competition for the jobs that exist, and in turn, drive down the cost of labour.
Nothing pleases a corporation more than having five people compete for the same
job.

Competitiveness means good times for machines, not
workers, because our tax systems privilege machines over workers.

A lost job can put a smile on any shareholder’s face.

Eric Reguly, Globe and Mail, Oct. 24, 1998

We are developing in the United States a huge underclass of
unwanted people, many of them the descendants of the exploitation of the South
American and Latin American countries by American piratical capitalism. Not all
capitalism is piratical, but some of it certainly is. And we have a fantastic gap
beginning to exist between rich and poor.

Fr. Benedict Groeshel

Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people
who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on
specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they
are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress
makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them
with the wealth produced by the progress.

Jacques Ellul

Wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Oliver Goldsmith

There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.

John Maynard Keynes

The most persistent fallacy about banking is that banks are
intermediators between lenders and borrowers. In fact the cardinal function of
banks is not intermediation but money-creation.

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

What banks loan “for the most part” is money they
create—non-preexisting money.

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

Then came the second Amsterdam discovery, although the
principle was known elsewhere. [Bank] deposits...did not need to be left idly in the
bank. They could be lent. The bank then got interest. The borrower then had a
deposit that he could spend. But the original deposit still stood to the
credit of the original depositor. That too could be spent. Money, spendable money,
had been created. Let no one rub his or her eyes. It’s still being
done—every day. The creation of money by a bank is as simple as this, so simple, I’ve
often said, that the mind is slightly repelled.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

Our economic system creates scarcity in the midst of
plenty.

Scarcity is what gives the moneyed interests their control over
the economy and keeps the poor in chronic dependency. Poor communities have
what it takes to become hives of economic activity. There are more than enough
needs and skills to go around.

The supply of money depends on people going into debt, and
the level of debt within an economy is no more than the measure of the amount of
money the banks have created.

In making loans banks create enough money for the principal
to be repaid, but not enough for the interest as well as the principal to be repaid. If
all loans had to be repaid on the same day some borrowers would necessarily have
to default. It is in the very nature of the system to create this type of problem.
Banks are always in a “need to catch-up” situation. Thus every year on average the
supply of bank created money needs to be increased by at least the average rate of
interest that banks charge on their loans. This assertion is true enough to be
significant, but greatly oversimplifies the actual situation.

The banks have the ability to shut down the economy at will.
They can veto prosperity by refusing to make net new loans.

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

The Federal Reserve [the privately owned U.S. central bank]
definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in
circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.

Milton Friedman

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our
liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy
that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from
the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.

Thomas Jefferson

[Andrew Jackson’s] energy was largely directed towards
saving us from the chief evil which destroys the nations of today. He sought to cut
down, as with a sword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and
he must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind him,
because all the politicians were against him.

G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 1922

Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is
restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred
responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and
futile... Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes the
nation’s laws... Usury once in control will wreck any nation.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

Historically, usury was defined as any interest whatever on an
unproductive loan.

Our whole banking system I have ever abhorred, I continue to
abhor, and I shall die abhorring.

John Adams

All money in our society, except the tiny portion (6%) still
created by government, comes into existence only if someone is willing to borrow it
and pay the interest and the principal on the loan.

David Gracey, Economic Reform, June 2001

Creating money is immensely profitably to a government or a
banking system.

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

The basic issue is whether the financial elite or the
government on behalf of the people should have the profit from creating
money.

Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo, 1996

The very idea of a government that can create money for
itself allowing banks to create money that the government then borrows and pays
interest on is so preposterous that it staggers the imagination. Either everyone in
government in charge of the procedure is deficient in intelligence or they have been
bought and paid for by those who profit from their venality and infidelity to the
public interest.

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

Between 1980 and 1990 Latin American countries paid $418
billion on original borrowings of $80 billion.

Approximately $140 billion in foreign aid flowed from the
rich to the poor countries between 1960 and 1993. Approximately $1400 billion in
debt payments flowed from the poor to the rich countries during the same
period.

According to the UN’s World Development Report, third
world debt has increased to $2000 billion, up from $100 billion 30 years ago.

Behind the abstraction known as ‘the markets’ lurks a set of
institutions designed to maximize the wealth and power of the most privileged group
of people in the world, the creditor-rentier class of the First World and their junior
partners in the Third.

Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How it Works, and For
Whom

A rentier is an investor whose relationship to a company or
enterprise is strictly limited to the ownership of financial wealth (such as stocks or
bonds) and the receipt of income on that wealth (such as dividends or
interest).

[The] financial system performs dismally at its advertised
task, that of efficiently directing society’s savings towards their optimal investment
pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the
allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment.

Doug Henwood

High interest rates focus on the revenue of a parasitic
class.

Historically the financial system has been structured in favour
of moneyed interests, that is, creditors.

Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo, 1996

A tight-money policy reinforces inequality in two ways. Its
high interest rates disproportionately reward the rich, and the resulting
unemployment disproportionately punishes the poor.

Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo, 1996

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there
is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve
some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption
and more income to sustain it—a struggle that modern corporations, modern
unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage—will drive up
prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many
wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between
inflation, unemployment, or controls.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

For many Americans business is the business of life. It is
also the romance of life. We shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we
are glad to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much poetry
wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any other hobby; and
one is disposed to add that it does fill their imaginations like any other delusion.
For the true criticism of all this commercial romance would involve a criticism of
this historic phase of commerce. These people are building on sand, though it
shines like gold, and for them like fairy gold. Half the financial operations they
follow deal with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a fairy
tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing but harm; but it
does them good to buy and sell them... Business really is romance; for it is not
reality.

G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 1922

Growth is the mantra of our society because the economy
can’t remain healthy without growth.

Impregnable monopolies aside (and these are few), profits are
both the hallmark of capitalism and its Achilles’ heel, for no business can
permanently maintain its prices much above its costs. There is only one
way in which profits can be perpetuated; a business—or an entire
economy—must grow.

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1961

As we slide into the first recession of the 21st century (the
experts being in denial, as always), it is timely to reflect on its causes. First and
foremost is the underlying debt which a modern economy is obliged to incur in
order to grow. Sooner or later, depending on credit conditions and interest rates,
that debt becomes unsustainable and must be repudiated.

David Gracey, Economic Reform, April 2001

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which
neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community;
it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to
an automatic system.

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1961

Capitalism is chronically unstable.

Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United
States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and
1987.

In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number
of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way.
This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the
principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism
been more numerous and varied.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

In our society competitive capitalism has put family life and
working life on a collision course.

In Canada statistics show that over 70 percent of the burden
of caring for children, the aged, the disabled and the sick falls on women most of
whom receive no pay for these very essential tasks.

Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of
capitalism, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and
thus increase the gap between them.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Even at capitalism’s best—when the rich grow richer
but even the poor grow richer too—the rich grow richer faster than the poor
and the distribution of income grows worse and with it the ability of the least
fortunate to pay the prices.

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

The free market is notorious for distributing resources in a
highly unequal manner, with great concentrations of wealth at the top and poverty at
the bottom. Our social programs, modest compared to those of many other Western
countries, play an important role in redistributing some of those resources from the
haves to the have-nots.

Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo, 1996

The total dividend income declared in 1995 by the bottom 9.7
million Canadian tax-filers (47% of all those submitting tax returns) was $310
million. The estimated dividend income received by the Thomson family in 1995
from its 72% ownership share of the Thomson Corporation and its 22% ownership
share of the Hudson’s Bay Company was $310 million.

Jim Stanford, Paper Boom, 1999

Under capitalism the more money you have, the easier it is to
make money, and the less money you have, the harder.

Wherever there is great property there is great inequality.
The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many.

Adam Smith

The financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households [in
the U.S.] exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.

Ralph Nader

The richest 20 percent of humanity owns 85 percent of the
total global wealth, and the poorest 20 percent owns 1.4 percent. The combined
worth of 358 individuals around the world who have assets in excess of one billion
amounts to 45 percent of the combined annual income of all the world’s
people.

Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80
percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you’ve got a $30 trillion (US) world
economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries... These inequities can’t
exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in
terms of social breakdown.

James Wolfensohn President of the World Bank

No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as
providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health
services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No
truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

We can have democracy in this country or we can have great
wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis

The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person,
one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.

It’s a hoary superstition that democratically elected
governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially
stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and
waste.

Dorothy L. Sayers

According to the International Institute for Environment and
Development, the annual amount spent globally on advertising aimed at increasing
consumption topped $430 billion in 1998.

Consumer capitalism is dedicated to the proposition that
production is good in itself, no matter what is produced. The net effect is the
massive production of absurd, empty and useless items which are nevertheless
utterly serious since we earn our living from them, and dedicate our leisure time to
them.

Jacques Ellul

There is hardly anything in the world that some man can’t
make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only
are this man’s lawful prey.

John Ruskin

Debt economies create a bias in favour of cheap goods.

To be happy you need community, authenticity, and energy.
Unfortunately...

Intense economic activity often ruins many other good things,
and tends to corrupt other values.

Economics from education to public service is being
reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.

John Ralston Saul

We believe in money.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

The great fact of the twentieth century is the definite
emergence of a new type of civilisation different from anything that the world has
known up until now. Sometimes called ‘mass-civilisation’ it is not so much
civilisation of the masses as civilisation in which every side of human life is
subordinated to the requirements of large economic blocks. The population itself
changes not only its culture, but even its racial composition in obedience to the
demands of these economic interests. If a person is to enjoy the material benefits of
mass-civilisation, they must put aside their individuality and conform to standardised
patterns of thought and conduct, even extending down to details of taste and
personal habit. The person who rejects standardization and refuses to conform will
pay a terrible price. In the mass state humanity has become the servant of the
economic interests of a few people.

Christopher Dawson

Conflict or competition carried to an extreme will tend to
produce sameness on all sides. A single inexorable logic will finally reduce
everything to the same terms.

René Girard

A human being has a right and a duty to preserve his
individuality from forces attempting to absorb it and reduce it to type.

Each of us has the right to choose the life we lead.

What counts in a market-intensive society is not the effort to
please or the pleasure that flows from that effort, but the coupling of labour with
capital, however useless or damaging the result.

It used to be that economic activity was a means to an end,
the end being the enjoyment of life. Now we are forced to dedicate our lives to the
service of the economy.

To be ignorant or unconvinced of one’s own needs has
become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes
standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for
alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.

Ivan Illich

Economic growth has no limits. If you hear anyone tell you
that there’s a limit to growth, they’re wrong and we should avoid those kinds of
people. That’s why we’re so successful in the Conservative government.

Deputy Economic Minister under Mulroney

The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to
consume a never-ending array of products.

There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be
multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the
exercise of their personal freedom.

When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it
deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And
precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with
difficulty.

Childless couples and people with smaller families consume
more than people with larger families. The reason for this is childless couples have
nothing to do. They spend their lives trying to think of things to spend their money
on.

The work and spend cycle is draining our energy.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to
serve them one’s self?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the twentieth century we increasingly look to work to
answer the question of identity.

Work is the essence of who I am.

Carol Heilbroner

A lot of jobs don’t allow you to be who you are.

There is dignity in work only when it is work freely
accepted.

Albert Camus

Most jobs are boring and of little intrinsic value. For every
job that improves the lot of humanity and makes the world a better or more
interesting place to live in, there are scores that do nothing of the sort.

Pierre Home-Douglas

That state is a state of slavery in which a man does what he
likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of
him.

Eric Gill

Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market
equivalent don’t show up in the calculations of economists.

Ivan Illich

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to
poetry; to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or
market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Robert Louis Stevenson

People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they
decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

Eric Hoffer

Currency speculation—over a trillion dollars a
day—is a tax-free activity.

The notion of a tax on “day trades” or other speculative
swaps was revived in recent years, but has been studiously ignored by all our
purveyors of conventional economic wisdom. That is because we have been
persuaded, against logic, and moral sense, that the institution that most needs our
support these days is not society, nor the human community, but the global
corporation.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

Corporations have nothing to do with values, and they know
it, and sometimes say it.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

There is one and only one social responsibility of
business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to improve its profits
so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and
free competition, without deception and fraud.

Milton Friedman

Social needs don’t feature in contemporary economic
theory.

The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has
no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole
object is gain.

Napoleon

Capital in money form has no citizenship. It is fungible, an
asset capable of moving from place to place in a nanosecond.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

Just as plants suck up moisture from the earth, so do
corporations draw out and drain the surpluses inherent in the contributions of labour
and the resources of nature. The corporate invader’s primary objective is to
increase its own wealth and assets, not the level of community income.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

People of the same trade seldom meet together but the
conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise
prices.

Adam Smith

Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American
finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of
stocks and bonds and credits. Later on, a Henry Ford might introduce an era of
intensely production-minded captains of industry, but the Harrimans, Morgans,
Fricks, and Rockefellers were far more interested in the exciting manipulation of
huge masses of intangible wealth than in the humdrum business of turning out
goods.

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 1961

Capital movements are no longer necessarily related to the
production of goods and services. Through the financial markets of the world,
capital movements today are overwhelmingly concerned with the capture of and
trade in property rights, the ownership of assets that magnify a corporation’s wealth,
power, and control. It is what John Maynard Keynes described as “a casino
world”—wealth without worth.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

This is the standard procedure for corporate growth these
days; one company buys up another on loans that are floated on the basis of future
earnings, and the monopoly or oligopoly created in this way produces the necessary
funds by squeezing out competition, and passing the costs along to the consumer.
The bucket that holds the new wealth is called a corporation.

Eric Kierans, Remembering, 2001

The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for
efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.

G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 1922

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not
sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Most government is by the rich for the rich.

Government comprises a large part of the organized injustice
in any society, ancient or modern.

Civil government, insofar as it is instituted for the security of
property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, and for
the defence of those who have property against those who have none.

Adam Smith

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think
criminal.

John Maynard Keynes

Few [economic problems], if any, are difficult of solution.
The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to
be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not
wish to say so.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

For society to function some kind of reasonable balance has
to be stuck between the competing interests of creditors and debtors. Although the
mandate of the Bank of Canada was to maintain a delicate balance between
encouraging growth and fighting inflation, the Bank opted to focus exclusively on
fighting inflation. In doing so it came down heavily in favour of those with
financial assets to protect, and against those whose primary need was
employment.

Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo, 1996

Economics is really politics in disguise.

Hazel Henderson

The war [World War II] revealed two of the enduring
features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between
spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest
outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound.
Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe.
It’s a difference that still persists.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

If you want poor people to work you restore their incentive
by giving them less, such as by cutting social services. If you want rich people to
work you restore their incentive by giving them more, such as by cutting
taxes.

Jim Stanford, Paper Boom, 1999

Government’s motto often seems to be, “To them that hath it
shall be given.”

William F. Hixson, It’s Your Money, 1997

The statement, “The debt problem has become so extreme
that we have no choice but to cut social spending” is presented as an objective
assessment of our situation. But can you imagine a media commentator making the
following assertion? “The debt problem has become so extreme that we have no
choice but to raise taxes on the rich.”

Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo, 1996

Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend
themselves against the over-taxed.

Bernard Berenson

One of the myths of the modern world is that if there are no
barriers between nations they are going to get along.

By doing away with borders we are creating more and more
the conditions of violence because borders contain and limit violence.

René Girard

When the world is globalized you’re going to set fire to the
whole thing with one match.